Along the Path

I'm not even kidding! Lawson's path took him right by where the Charlotte Motor Speedway sits now. He describes the rolling terrain of the day and perfectly captures the view from the speedway, at a natural crest where Route 29 and the road to Harrisburg meet.

""Still passing along such Land as we had done for many days before, which was, Hills and Vallies, about 10 a Clock we reach'd the Top of one of these Mountains, which yielded us a fine Prospect of a very level Country, holding so , on all sides."

Which is exactly what you see from the Charlotte Motor Speedway: when you sit in the stands you get to see cloud shows and hills falling away beyond. I showed up on a Tuesday evening, which meant they had a bunch of small-scale racing going on, and I sat in the grandstand eating chips and drinking soda pop just as Lawson would have done, had he had the opportunity.

I had left Charlotte in the morning, dropped off by my friend Mike Graff of Charlotte Magazine. We talked about Charlotte's interesting history as a crossroads. As I mentioned last post, Lawson's group met an Indian trader there who was waiting for company before heading back northeast on the Trading Path, in this part of the world now more commonly known as Tryon Street, and where it crossed Trade, supposedly another trade route to the coast; their crossing is the highest point in the surrounding neighborhoods, which is why Charlotte still calls its downtown uptown, since residents had to walk uphill to get there.

Charlotte is the Carolinas' largest city and is really the only city with a big-city feel that Lawson would have passed, but even that doesn't last long. Ten minutes' walk from Trade and Tryon and you're in the North End, which welcomes you but offers mostly strip malls -- to say nothing of self-storage, vacant lots, and the homeless.

Pretty pretty downtown!

Welcome to Not Downtown.

... which is still pretty close.

But what you get above all walking along the old Trading Path (it turns into Route 29, satisfyingly known as the Old Concord-Salisbury Road, around, natch, Concord)? You get car stuff. Cheap car lots, car repair, car parts, car tires, car rentals, car inspection, and "credit doctors" who will help you into a car you probably can't pay for. There is so much buying, selling, and maintaining of cars along these major roads that I have consistently found it hard to believe the auto industry accounts for only 3.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. By the way -- I stumbled a few trips ago into the company in South Carolina that makes an enormous percentage of the giant signs you see all over the country at auto dealerships. I'll tell you all about them soon.

But: Nascar. Nobody needs to tell you Americans love cars, and the story of the growth of stock car racing is a remarkable tale of postwar American prosperity. So I found it delightful that Charlotte, at least, offers more than just parts and signs. The speedway was started in 1959 to cash in on the growing popularity of stock car racing, and construction went along just fine until the builders reached what Lawson probably could have told them, from walking the terrain, that they'd find: granite. "A half-million yards of solid granite," according to "Charlotte Motor Speedway: From Granite to Gold." That cost five times as much to cope with, and the speedway ran into the financial troubles that all enormous undertakings tend to have.

Anyhow, the region needed a speedway for the simple reason that stock car racing lives in central Carolina. You can find a million sources explaining how farmers growing corn learned that it was a lot cheaper to distill it and distribute it as whiskey than it was to transport and sell it as food, and how during Prohibition that meant delivering an illegal product. Which meant your car had to be faster than a police car but look perfectly normal. Add in that you needed cars that could rocket along straight stretches of highway but handle in both curving mountain roads during pickup and city streets during delivery and you've about covered every element of the racecars that fill the speedway.

So, anyhow, the day I walked through the speedway wasn't running some enormous Sprint Cup race, with 150,000 or so people clogging grandstand and infield. It was an event in the Summer Shootout series with small cars running on a quarter-mile oval along the frontstretch, with maybe a thousand fans paying eight bucks for a ducat and enjoying the wreckfest. Racing is always fun, but my point here wasn't racing, it was Lawson.

As I mentioned the spot is high on a ridge, and though the camping outside the track was hardly a thing of backwoods beauty, I managed to make a comfortable little home for myself even on a very hot night.

The night was hot enough that I barely slept, and when I awoke at 5 a.m. I downed a couple Pop Tarts, policed the campsite, and headed north at 6. I'm usually on the trail around 9:15 a.m. under any circumstances: if I wake at 7, I dither, and if I wake at 8:30 I rush. Lawson's guides felt the same, "Indians never setting forward 'till the Sun is an Hour or two high, and hath exhall'd the Dew from the Earth." But this day it was scheduled to be in the high 90s, and the urban heat island effect was something Lawson and his guides never had to deal with. But according to the EPA, asphalt can be 50-90 degrees fahrenheit hotter than surrounding temperature. I was walking in terrain not just changed from Lawson's day -- I was walking in a climate that simply did not exist in his day. He complained of freezing cold, and when I awoke one day months ago and saw the thermometer at 10 degrees I felt we shared something. What an environment of asphalt, concrete, and clear-cutting would yield would have been beyond his imagination. Having lived it, I can tell you the answer is mostly as simple as the one the delightful and excellent biologist and writer Rob Dunn suggests in this piece about heat-mapping his walk to work: plant more trees. I'm here to tell you: walking along a bare asphalt berm can be miserable, and even in the hottest weather simply ducking under a tree makes an enormous difference. The planet hates strip malls and parking lots. Plant trees.

So anyhow, along Lawson and I went, north from the speedway towards Concord. Charlotte grew from a crossroads town to a textile town to a banking town and now is a big banking city. Concord's little twin brother, Kannapolis, was home of Cannon Mills and known as Towel City. and the walk north of the speedway to Concord was a study. For a long time in the heat that even at 7 am was brutal I passed racing-related shops -- restoration parts, cams, engine shops. Then came a long stretch of what I call the Anthropocene Suburban -- long stretches of road between small fields raising cattle or pines, the roadside ditches swaying with Queen Anne's lace, daisies and black-eyed Susans, primrose, Scutellaria (any of various purple-flowered mints), and dandelions.

Thanks for the sandwich, Lobo!

Nearing Concord, however, I started running into empty textile mills advertising for tenants, though downtown Concord shows the combination of Charlotte-suburban growth mixed with small-town empty office blues. I ate a delicious sandwich at Ellie's, where Lobo, my waitperson, knew that the Trading Path worked its way through Concord. I love when people know that. Lobo also sent me to the First Presbyterian Memorial Gardens in Concord, which she said would be like visiting the gardens at Biltmore in Asheville. She was right! The church has owned the property since 1810, but the main church building moved, and by the 1930s the graveyard was neglected. In the 1930s the Williams family began restoring it, and

now the garden covers nearly a full city block, with a half-dozen fountains and grave markers including everything from boulders to obelisks to plain old lovely stone slabs. At left is a glimpse of what you'll see if you go to visit, and take it from Lobo and me, you should.

So on I went, north of Concord to, as I mentioned, the delightfully named Old Salisbury Concord Road, where I quickly encountered something my old pal Val Green had bidden me to look out for: an

enormous granite outcropping, right along the road, described by Lawson: "We went about 25 Miles, travelling through a pleasant, dry Country, and took up our Lodgings by a Hill-side, that was one entire Rock, out of which gush'd out pleasant Fountains of well-tasted Water." No gushing fountains now, though the rock face remains, running along the left of the road, sometimes covered in hanging foliage. I did not sleep there.

Along I went, though, until the road begin to diverge away from Kannapolis. That was as far as I cared to go in that blasting sun, having covered about twelve

9 feet of bronze intimidation.

miles that day before 11 a.m., but also because I wanted to go to Kannapolis as well, though Lawson did not. In Kannapolis -- another onetime textile town trying to figure out what's next -- they're building a research campus and working to build on the success of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park between Raleigh and Durham (Lawson walked by; I live there and will walk by soon enough). Most important to me, though, after starting my trip in downtown Charlotte, where lies the Nascar Hall of Fame, and sleeping at the speedway, was the Earnhardt statue.

One has surely heard of Dale Earnhardt, the Kannapolis native sone who became a legendary stock car racer, perhaps the best of all time. He died in a wreck at Daytona in 2001, but long before that the taciturn, stubborn competitor had become a symbol for the rural, Southern fans of Nascar's early explosive growth. When he died, though not everyone in mainstream culture understood this, in the South and across Nascar America it was like Elvis had died. Earnhardt's father, Ralph, was a racer -- racing was his way out of the Kannapolis textile mills he worked in. Earnhardt too was uneducated and headed for the mills, but his racing gave him a way out. His success on the track became a touchstone for generations of Carolinians, and his death broke hearts.

So in Kannapolis, if you go to downtown Kannapolis, you won't find a huge amount -- on the redevelopment scale it's behind Concord and nowhere near Charlotte -- but you will find a statue of Dale Earnhardt, in a little plaza built for that purpose. It's part of the Dale Trail, a collection of Earnhardt touchstones you can visit. You can visit Ralph's grave, the family's old neighborhood, roads named after Earnhardt, "Idiot Circle," the cruising area of Kannapolis, and of course the plaza, which has not just the 9-foot bronze statue but a granite monument and a circle of benches. You can also drive to race shops and stores and such, but you get the idea. Lawson walked through here, describing the place to the world for the first time; no statue. Washington came through here on his tour of the South, solidifying the nation in the aftermath of the adoption of the Constitution. No statue.

Earnhardt drove race cars, and he gets a statue. I say this not in criticism but in description. You want to understand the South? Look at who the people raise up. In Camden, South Carolina, you see an awful lot of the Indian chief King Hagler, and you know why: he was a local. Washington rode through; Lawson walked through. But Earnhardt was a local. Earnhardt Carolina loves. Let's hope they come to love Lawson as much.

In my journal I at one point wrote down the series of transitions I'm making as I follow Lawson's path, seeing the vast differences between the landscape I traverse and the one he did.

Lawson left Charleston and went from ocean to marshland to river to swamp to forest, and as far as that goes so did I: a week along the Intracoastal Waterway by canoe, a day up the Santee still by canoe, then a few days messing around in the cypress-tupelo swamps of the Francis Marion National Forest and the Wee Tee State Forest as the Santee traveled northwest towards its formation at the confluence of the Wateree and the Congaree, visiting the High Hills of Santee and the 150-foot tupelos and acres of cypress knees in the swamps of the Congaree National Park.

Then it was towns. I had cake and coffee in the tiny crossroads hamlet of Jamestown and slept in the church, visiting little Randolph's Landing, the spot at the end of the road where the government plonked Lake Marion, widely regarded one of the Army Corps of Engineers' worst mistakes in history, drowning an ecosystem and its culture and damaging not only the Santee River but the Cooper River Basin, where it ships some of its water in a wrongheaded attempt to improve Charleston Harbor.

From there I walked on to the tevolutionary town of Camden, where I was treated like a king and slept in the basement of the rebuilt Kershaw House, and from there to Lancaster, where I met not only the delightful people at USC-Lancaster but the Catawba Indians themselves, who treated me as well as they had treated Lawson three centuries ago, and then on up to Pineville, the last little stop before Charlotte.

And this time I walked into Charlotte. So I've gone ocean, marsh, river, swamp, hills, town, city, and now big city. The best surprise I had in Charlotte was the sidewalks. Throughout my walk I have complained, pretty

Where the sidewalk ends. Good luck!

The engineer who designed this highway segment came from a planet where people do not have legs, they have wheels.

much constantly, about the lack of sidewalks and capacity for pedestrians to share the roads. Some of that comes simply from walking through very rural territory. But the approach to every city has meant running for my life, and approaching Charlotte from Pineville, where I stopped last time, was no different. Pineville is a little comfortable suburb, with streets and sidewalks and shops, and then you run out of sidewalk and you cross I-485 and you just pray that you stay lucky. And then you walk along a strip of soul-sucking highway with about 16,741 car dealerships (that's an estimate; I might have missed a couple)

But then an astonishing thing happens. You find yourself on South Boulevard and ... there's sidewalk. And I'm here to tell you, that for the ten-or-so miles it takes you to get into Charlotte, you have sidewalk the whole way, and for that I could just weep with gratitude.

That was hardly the first thing I noticed about Charlotte. First, even as I approached Pineville, I left for the time being any semblance of rural land, as I discussed here. Before the Charlotte metro area, everywhere I went was plantations and forests and pine tree farming and meadows: South Carolina is rural. Starting to near Charlotte, instead of hitting large areas of land and seeing cows and trees and granite, I saw an endless parade of subdivisions -- of Glen Laurels and Clairemonts, of Fox Trails and Bridge Hamptons, Farringtons and Almond Glens. Those are all names of subdivisions I jotted down as I walked past. We've all heard the famous joke that a subdivision is named after the geographical feature they bulldozed and the wildlife they killed to make it, but once you've got to Parkway Crossing (real place!) you have to understand that they're just building them faster than they can name them. I mean what's next: Don't Walk Acres? The Glen at Traffic Circle?

Which brings us to Charlotte! Charlotte's origin story is that Trade and Tryon, the main downtown crossroads, has been a crossroads for time out of mind. Tryon is pretty much the Trading Path, which I've been following (and Lawson followed) since about Camden, SC. Trade was another path, running between the Cherokee settlements to the west and the coast. At the crossroads was a Catawba settlement, and that made a great place to hang out and wait for whatever was next.

In fact, at that point Lawson met someone he didn't expect. Lawson, like me, knew he was coming into the city: "This day, we pass'd through a great many Towns, and Settlements," he says. "About three in the Afternoon, we reach'd the Kadapau King's House, where we met with one John Stewart, a Scot, then an inhabitant of James-River in Virginia ." Stewart was one of the Indian traders from the Chesapeake who made their way up and down the Trading Path, bringing European goods and returning with deerskins and furs. Stewart was waiting around with the Catawbas because a Seneca raiding party was in the area and he didn't care to travel alone. Lawson mentions that Stewart had heard of the approach of Lawson's group nearly three weeks before and had waited for him, giving a little sense of how effective Indians communicated without any help from the Internet. Stewart joined Lawson's gang and they agreed to journey forward together.

But not before Lawson irritated his host by refusing to enjoy the services of "two or three trading Girls" the Catawba King kept around for visitors. When Lawson politely declined -- and even one of his his most ready companions, who had recently woken up to learn he had been robbed by a trading girl he had enjoyed for the night, declined as well -- the king didn't like it. "His Majesty flew into a violet Passion, to be thus slighted, telling the Englishmen they were good for nothing." Still, they hung around a couple days, baking bread and otherwise preparing for their journey, which at this point began to turn eastward back towards the coast.

We ain't in rural South Carolina no more.

A chemical company on South Boulevard. Not too much industry in Charlotte though. Banks aplenty, as we could see from the skyscrapers.

Charlotte honors its history as a place where people meet to do business -- it's an enormous banking capital now, and it has some astonishing skyscrapers to show it, along with the explosive redevelopment that tends to go with prosperous Sun Belt cities. (Read this piece to learn the weird and cool backstory on how Charlotte emerged as a banking center.) It even has a fabulous light rail transit line, which made my life extremely easy. My good friend and leader Val Green helped me leave my car at the southernmost end of the line, so when I made my way into town all I had to do to get back to my car was jump on the trolley. I was glad he helped -- walking from the end of the Lynx line the extra mile back to Pineville would have been one car-dodging trip too many at the end of the day.

Walking into Charlotte up South Boulevard is a delight, though. You walk past about a million self-storage places, which along with the limitless car lots lead a visitor to the conclusion that people in Charlotte -- and I suppose all modern people -- have cars only so they can fill them with stuff, which they then dump off in warehouses. I passed a little chemical plant after walking through neighborhoods easily identifiable through signs on restaurants and roadside stores: hispanic, asian, African-American. Then as I closed in manufacturing plants-turned-upscale-living-and-shopping started dominating, and by the time I could get glimpses of downtown I was in neighborhoods that took serious coin to inhabit -- off the main drag, you could see one or two of the old millhouses remained, but almost everything else was a teardown.

Once I got into downtown it was like the Peterson's Guide to the Ecosystems of the Big Cities. Sports stadium? Check (three! minor league baseball, pro football, and pro basketball!). Adorable minipark? Check: One with a literary theme and, for some reason, spitting fish. Then there was Trade and Tryon, and though no Catawba King greeted me, I had been well treated by the Catawbas already (more about that soon!). As for trading girls, I appear to have missed that neighborhood.

We're hee-eere!

These fish take turns spitting at each other. It's pretty neat. The rest of the park is all about books.

I'm more worried about cars than raiding parties, though we'll see how that shakes out when I hit the trail again.

It's a gas station rag: more absorbent than a bandanna and you don't worry about getting it dirty. It's gone every step of the Lawson Trek -- plus a fifth of the Appalachian Trail, all over the Mediterranean, and around the world once.

The Lawson Trek made an awful mistake on Monday and failed to publicly celebrate Towel Day, the day on which all persons who travel -- that is, all persons -- celebrate the famous and utterly accurate representation by author Douglas Adams that the most valuable travel accoutrement is the towel. To wit:

I thought of this because I was about to take a bike ride, and in my bike basket I always have a towel, of course, because you can use it to protect a bottle of wine that you buy, pat yourself off before lunch if you ride to meet someone, wrap up other purchases, or, I guess, ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the ... you get the idea.

Anyhow, I unconscionably failed to share the moment on May 25, the internationally celebrated towel day. Just the same I take comfort in the fact that by missing the date I celebrated as a writer the day I failed to celebrate as a traveler. That is, by missing the date I lived Adams' other most famous quote: "I love deadlines," he famously said. "I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

So I include a picture here of the small hand towel the Lawson Trek keeps with it at all times. Plus, celebrating perhaps the best piece of travel advice ever given (Lawson offers no such simple advice) seems like a great way to note that we've hit the halfway point on the Lawson Trek -- our next steps will take us into Charlotte, which back in Lawson's time would have been better known as "where a couple paths cross." There Lawson reached what he called "the Kadapau King's House," where he met not only the Catawba king but another traveler, one John Stewart, a

trader from Virginia who was staying with the Catawbas despite having mostly run out of goods because, says Lawson, "hearing that Sinnagers (Indians from Canada) were abroad in the Country, he durst not venture homewards, till he saw us, having heard that we were coming above 20 days before." They refer, of course, to Senecas, members of the Five Nations of the Iroquois in the north. They were considered fierce warriors and conducted raids into the south. Lawson calls them "a Sort of People that range several thousands of Miles, making all Prey they lay their Hands on. These are fear'd by all the savage Nations I ever was among, the Westward Indians dreading their Approach."

Anyhow, Stewart joined up with Lawson at what we would call Charlotte, and the Catawba King expressed a good deal of dissatisfaction that Lawson and his friends did not care to consort with the "trading Girls" he provided for their entertainment: "his Majesty flew into a violent Passion, to be thus slighted, telling the Englishmen, they were good for nothing." I do not expect to be so feted in Charlotte, though I do expect to discuss barbecue there -- Lawson discusses it, and I happen to know someone there who knows all about barbecue.

There's lots to come as we turn towards the coast now, and lots to catch up on. You may expect to hear about the company where an enormous amount of the giant signs for auto dealerships all over the country happen to be made; of a woman who makes brooms by hand; of a bar where I passed one of the most pleasant hours of my life; and of my sojourn among those very Catawbas, who were very kind to me in South Carolina. So, Lawsonians: More to come, and plenty of it. Stay tuned.